In First Return to Japan Court, Jurors Convict and Sentence

Members of Japan's first post-war jury spoke to the news media after the conclusion of a trial at the Tokyo District Court on Thursday.Credit
Pool photograph by Jiji Press

TOKYO — Japan’s first jury trial in more than a half-century ended Thursday as a panel of three judges and six jurors convicted a Tokyo man of murder and then sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

The jury in Tokyo District Court convicted the man, Katsuyoshi Fujii, 72, of fatally stabbing a 66-year-old female neighbor with a survival knife.

Mr. Fujii had pleaded guilty, saying he attacked the woman after she knocked down bottles of water he had placed around his house to ward off cats, according to local news reports.

In the most dramatic change to Japan’s criminal justice system since the end of World War II, juries are now empowered to decide guilt and sentencing. And in marked contrast to most Western judicial systems, jurors may directly question witnesses, defendants and victims.

Although reticent at first, all six lay jurors asked questions during the trial, which lasted just four days. Criminal trials in Japan sometimes drag on for years, and the lack of transparency in the judicial process has often been frustrating to the public.

The verdict closed a week of intensive coverage by Japanese media, with up-to-the-minute reports from the courthouse about details, like the questions being asked and the jurors’ facial expressions as they looked at bloody photos from the scene.

Juries in criminal trials were discontinued in Japan in 1943, as World War II intensified. A 2004 law reinstituted the jury system, to begin this year.

But opinion polls have shown the Japanese public to be highly skeptical of the jury system, primarily because of deep cultural aversions, including a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with colleagues and to question authority. Many Japanese have also expressed reluctance to participate in cases involving capital punishment.

The jurors, known as “saiban-in,” are selected from the election rolls and must be at least 20 years old. They also must have at least a junior-high-level education. Politicians and lawyers are excluded.

Six lay jurors are teamed with three professional judges, with each of the nine having one vote. Even if the three judges vote that a defendant is guilty, a not-guilty ruling by at least five of the jurors will prevail. But if the six jurors vote for a guilty verdict, the ruling will not stand unless at least one of the judges agrees.

Because the judges are involved in the jury’s deliberations, some legal analysts are concerned that the judges will dominate the discussion and perhaps skew the verdicts. Others see them as providing guidance to uncertain citizen-jurors.

“The notion that judges should serve as educators for lay judges was supported by the longstanding belief among Japanese elites that the average Japanese citizen lacks the political maturity to participate in governance,” the legal scholar Ingram Weber wrote in the East Asia Law Review. “It was this notion that was used to torpedo previous attempts to introduce lay participation in criminal justice.”

The new system, Mr. Weber wrote, has been “designed to democratize the criminal legal process” and serve as a way of “injecting a measure of common sense and public values into court decisions by giving lay persons a determining power over fact-finding and sentencing.”